But back to that Gov. Sarah Palin: Is it just a coincidence that the current issue of The Atlantic features a Joshua Green piece (headline: The Tragedy of Sarah Palin) that’s quite admiring of Palin’s gubernatorial record in Alaska?

Representative sample:

As governor, Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics. She did this in a way that seems wildly out of character today—by cooperating with Democrats and moderate Republicans to raise taxes on Big Business. And she succeeded to a remarkable extent in settling, at least for a time, what had seemed insoluble problems, in the process putting Alaska on a trajectory to financial well-being. Since 2008, Sarah Palin has influenced her party, and the tenor of its politics, perhaps more than any other Republican, but in a way that is almost the antithesis of what she did in Alaska. Had she stayed true to her record, she might have pointed her party in a very different direction.

Sarah Palin is inching ever closer to announcing a presidential run. The former governor visited Greta Van Susteren tonight and teased she had “the fire in the belly” to do it, but that much of the criticism from the media was teetering close to too much for her and her family to bear. Van Susteren took the comment defensively as Palin challenged her to “lead” her colleagues away from the harsher reporting, to which Van Susteren replied, “don’t take the bait.”

The whole messhegoss:

Sure sounds like Sarah’s feelin’ that spirit of helping America find its true self, which is to say, her. Your feelin’ goes here.